Thursday, February 27, 2014

South Carolina Gov. Nikki
Haley likes to say she wears high heels not as a fashion statement but to kick
unions.

“Unions are trying to get in wherever they can…My
job is to make sure I keep kicking them out,” Haley, a Republican, said the
other day.

“We discourage any companies that have unions
from wanting to come to South Carolina because we don’t want to taint the
water,” she told Rudolph Bell of the Greenville News in a video interview
posted online.

Such anti-union stiletto
swagger probably plays well on the campaign trail, and Haley is running for
re-election this fall. But a governor who turns up her nose at good-paying
jobs? Be careful what you wish for.

To hear some Southern Republican
politicians, labor unions are the William Tecumseh Sherman of our time, aiming to
lay waste to the South. Conservative activist Grover Norquist said as much
during the battle over whether the United Auto Workers would represent Volkswagen
workers at its plant in Chattanooga, Tenn.

The UAW vote was “step one”
of a union march on the South, Norquist said.

“They get this (plant),
then they start moving toward the other large companies…This is the gateway to
the South, and by that I mean all the right-to-work, not heavily unionized,
states,” he warned, according to a Reuters report.

Don’t head to the basement
with the silver just yet. The VW workers voted 712-626 against union representation.

In South
Carolina, Haley says she would welcome more of those non-union BMW jobs. But “I
discourage” factories with unions, she added. Her Democratic gubernatorial
opponent, State Sen. Vincent Sheheen, sensibly said that “if Ford Motor Co.
wanted to bring 10,000 jobs to South Carolina, we would welcome them with open
arms.”

The organizing fight in
Chattanooga took on epic proportions, with the Republican governor, state
legislators and U.S. Sen. Bob Corker warning of dire consequences if the union prevailed.
Corker, a Republican, said he had it on good authority that Volkswagen would
add an SUV assembly line, if workers rejected the union.

The hand-to-hand combat was
surprising because the company was not fighting the union. Volkswagen was
officially neutral but tacitly supportive. It wanted – and still hopes -- to
initiate a “works council” in Chattanooga, like those in its factories in
Germany and other countries.

A works council brings together
blue- and white-collar employees to make decisions about workplace issues, such
as new equipment or scheduling, in a cooperative setting. The council system
exists in all of VW’s plants except for Chattanooga and those in China. Under
American labor law, though, workers need a union before there can be a works
council.

It’s preposterous to think
that Americans can’t distinguish between the bad old days of union-company
warfare and a new, third way of collaborative management. After all, unions
have been shrinking in size and clout for decades. Last year, only 11.3 percent
of U.S. workers belonged to unions. In 1983, about 20 percent did.

North Carolina had the
lowest level of union membership at 3 percent. Five percent of Virginia workers
were union members. In South Carolina, 3.7 percent of workers belonged to unions;
in Tennessee, 6.1 percent. Union representation is growing in Alabama, where 10.7
percent of workers were union members, but even that is under the national
average. New York has the largest share of union members, 24.4 percent.

Southern states are among
the 24 right-to-work states, where a worker cannot be forced to join a union
because closed shops are banned. Even Michigan is
now a right-to-work state; its law went into effect last March.

After the vote in Chattanooga,
the head of Volkswagen’s top works council in Germany suggested that the
company might think twice before locating again in the South.

“I can imagine fairly well
that another VW factory in the United States, provided that one more should
still be set up there, does not necessarily have to be assigned to the South
again,” Bernd Osterloh told the German newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung.